Suchman describes the Illinois Studies in Inquiry Training Project at the University of Illinois. Three conditions facilitating inquiry in classroom settings are identified: a focus for attention, freedom, and a responsive environment. The elaboration of these conditions and the shift in motivation which results from creating them are discussed. Examples of the inquiry training process are presented. A pilot study is reported wherein it was discovered that children who rated high on cognitive control, impulsivity, and autonomy were more effective inquirers than children who were low on any of these three factors.

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Almost 20 years ago at the University of Illinois, I became interested in heuristic learning. My attention was attracted by research which revealed the startling fact that children were not asking questions in school; that is, they were not actively inquiring. The teachers were asking the questions, but this was mainly for the purpose of testing. Teachers also had all the answers. They were asking questions to see if the children had the answers. Nobody seemed to be searching for new knowledge. There was very little heuristic learning.Having the right answer was seen as more important than having one's own answer, or raising one's own questions. The rhetoric of conclusions, in Schwab's words, had displaced the rhetoric of inquiry. Students were expected to be the consumers of knowledge rather than its producers. These traditions of education were at odds with the traditions of science, at least since Galileo's time. It was the rare teacher who posed the challenging questions, and who supported and encouraged the children to search for their own answers. The authoritarian litany of questions and answers was the teacher's attempt to stay in control of the learning process.The memory is still vivid of the day my son brought home a science test from his second-grade class. It was a fill-in-the-blanks test and one of the questions was: "The are part of the earth." He had responded: "The air and the clouds" and the teacher had marked his answer "wrong," and had written in the "correct" answer: "The rocks and the trees." In visiting the teacher the next day I discovered where she had derived her peculiar terrestial limits; her answer was surprisingly direct and honest: "From the text." What troubled me was that my son was not at all disturbed by this. He seemed to accept the text as the ultimate source of truth. In fact, it seemed to be a comfort to him that knowledge was so conveniently packaged, stored, and guaranteed by authorities.By the middle of the second grade, he had already been indoctrinated into a closed system of knowledge in which a problem is solved by "looking it up."